“The era that we’re in is driven by instant gratification,” says Melissa Anelli, who chronicled the story of Potter worship in “Harry, a History.” “Harry Potter was a world in which we were forced to put everything down, and wait, and listen, and bask in all that.”
She saw the first movie at the Uptown theater in Washington, all alone in an unfamiliar city. She saw “Deathly Hallows” at the London premiere, a special guest invited to stand along the red carpet. Now she’s in Florida, where she’s helped organize LeakyCon, to which ardent fans make an annual pilgrimage. This year it will be structured not as a convention but as a graduation. The program is a yearbook — leather embossed with foil, with photos inside, marking the time they are leaving behind.
And what of those new fans, the ones who are just discovering it, the ones who will turn 8 or 9 every year and never realize what it was like to have to wait for hours at Barnes & Noble?
“I have read the seventh book five times,” says Adrian Hall, who is 9 and lives in Falls Church, and who devoured the books for the first time last year. His favorite is “Deathly Hallows.”
“I have it with me right now,” he says. “I like to give it a rest in between readings to sit there and imagine what happened. J.K. Rowling is a very good author.”
Is it over now, this collective cultural moment? Not really. Not at all.
“Deathly Hallows” is the last official visual representation of the series, but like Dumbledore’s phoenix rising from the ashes, the end represents new beginnings.
Last month, Rowling announced the release of Pottermore, a not-yet-unveiled Web site whose Twitter feed has close to 170,000 followers despite only 10 tweets. Pottermore has promised to expand the Potterverse, with never-released backstories on minor characters — how Harry’s piggish aunt and uncle first met, how Professor McGonagall once loved a Muggle.
“What we’re going to be getting is J.K.’s text,” says Heidi Tandy, the woman behind Fiction Alley, a well-known site for Harry Potter fan fiction. “Just her text, word for word.” That means that for the first time in a long time, fans will have new original material to look forward to. New characters to play at conferences. New romances to imagine. The books have ended, the movies are ending, but true fans have always known that Harry Potter really lives in hearts, not on page or screen.
“Harry Potter has everything,” says Spartz, the MuggleNet founder. He’s now 24, lives in Chicago, and runs the Spartz Network, a successful ring of community Web sites. “It has good versus evil. Love, sex and war. Right and wrong. Tough moral dilemmas. J.K. Rowling was providing moral guidance to an entire generation of readers. There is no important question left untouched.”
He pauses, pondering the question that launched his meditation.
“How has Harry Potter impacted my life? For over a decade, Harry Potter was my life.”
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